


Home Front USA: From the Archives

by Confessions_of_a_Closet_Bibliophile



Category: Supernatural, World War Z - Max Brooks
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dean is mentioned but does not appear, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02 Finale, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:48:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23521852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confessions_of_a_Closet_Bibliophile/pseuds/Confessions_of_a_Closet_Bibliophile
Summary: Supernatural/World War Z mashup, aka Sam and Dean kill some zombies and don't save the world, for once
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	Home Front USA: From the Archives

**Author's Note:**

> **[The following interview was initially excluded from my presentation to the United Nations for being overly long and meandering. I further withheld it from publication with the bulk of my findings due to outstanding warrants that had then yet to be dropped. After hundreds of United States citizens submitted petitions, the Winchesters received full pardons in light of their actions during the war.]**

**Lebanon, Kansas, USA**

**[In the years leading up to the first emergence of zombies in the United States of America, Sam and Dean Winchester appeared many times on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for multiple accounts of first degree murder, impersonating federal officers, armed robbery, grave desecration, and credit card fraud, among other charges. In the wake of the Battle of Yorkers and the United States's military retreat to the West Coast, their bunker in rural Kansas became a single-building safe zone reportedly housing upwards of 90 survivors at various points during the war. Sam Winchester agreed to meet with me under good faith, requesting that I not disclose their immediate location to the federal government.]**

We[1] first heard whispers of the living dead...zombies crawling out of the sea from isolated articles online. Conspiracy theories, cryptids, folk tales, superstitions and black magic. We keep track of things that most people don't believe in, at least until those myths come crashing through their windows. That’s where we operate. It’s what we do. 

**What do you do?**

**[Pause.]**

We hunt monsters. 

**What do you classify as monsters?**

Who. Who do we classify as monsters, you mean. Dean and I don’t always see eye-to-eye about that. I have a tendency to want to sympathize with them, the monsters. A lot of the time, not always, but a lot of the time, they were just normal people, like us. Until something happened to them, that is. 

The vast majority of our cases before the war were hauntings. Malevolent spirits, more colloquially, ghosts. All spirits were human once. Maybe they died and couldn’t pass on, for some reason. Maybe their place of rest was destroyed. Maybe there was a house built on their gravesite. Maybe they have some unfinished business to take care of. Whatever the cause, they’re stuck here. I’m not trying to say that all ghosts were good people. We put down H. H. Holmes's ghost back before the Solanum virus broke out, actually, and he wasn't the only spirit that murdered during his life. But death does change a person. The longer a human soul stays here, untethered, the more they start to lose themselves. No matter who they were before, they become like wild animals. They lash out in fear, in anger. We put them to rest so they can’t hurt anyone else. 

**Is that how you decide who the monsters are?**

If they hurt someone? Well, that’s normally how we find out about them. We look for mysterious deaths in newspapers, people disappearing all around the same place, unnatural activity like weird weather patterns, things that don’t seem quite right, and we start there. Like I said, not every paranormal entity is evil. We came across a whole nest of vampires that didn’t attack humans, lived on cattle blood. Once we found out, we let them go. We can’t always do that. They might not have any malicious intent, but if they can’t control themselves and keep killing people, we have to stop them. We try to find a cure, but sometimes we can’t. 

**How did you learn to hunt monsters?**

We were raised as hunters. I’m sure you saw it in our files, if you did your research before coming here. My mother was murdered when I was a baby. My dad took us on the road, taught us to protect people. I grew up in the Impala[2]and in a series of motels all across America. It wasn’t easy. I mean, I spent a lot of years wanting to get out, to be normal, to get to live an ordinary life. I left for a few years, but circumstances brought me back. 

**What circumstances?**

I would rather not talk about that. I will say that I came back initially to try to get justice for something. Falling back into hunting though, it fit me. 

**When did you first come across an infected person?**

It was pretty soon after they reached America. We caught wind of a mysterious disease spreading in New Bern, North Carolina. On the surface, it seemed similar to another bloodborne illness that we had run into before, which was called the Croatoan virus, no particular relation to the lost colony.[3] People who were infected by that virus reverted to a primal, violent sort of behavior. They went around infecting anyone who didn’t have it yet. Except that one was the result of demonic biowarfare.

**And the Solanum virus wasn’t?**

No, I don’t think so. I mean, it seems right up their alley, they’re all about causing chaos, Hail Satan and all that, but I don’t think it was them. 

**Why not?**

Well, uh. 

**[Pause.]**

I died. That wasn’t really a big deal, it was bound to happen eventually with the way we live and all, but Dean went and did something really dumb to get me back. I’m not gonna go into it because I don’t want to be responsible for desperate people reading this and deciding to try their hand. It’s not something that anyone should do. Trust me. 

Either way, we were supposed to have one year until Dean would get dragged to hell. That’s not just a euphemism or a saying. I’ve seen what happens, after the fact, and it’s not pretty. Dean had basically accepted it, but I was going crazy that whole year trying to figure a way to get him out of it. Around two months before his deadline, the US army lost in New York. When the day came, nothing happened. We waited up the whole night, but there wasn’t any sign of a single hellhound.[4] It’s not like demons to let a soul go, so I think something crazy must have been happening downstairs. Either way, no one ever came for Dean. 

**So what would you say caused the virus?**

Originally, I thought it might be voodoo. According to Haitian lore, zombies are reanimated to be servants of black magic practitioners, or bokors. They’re kept beholden to the will of a witch-doctor, who has control of their souls. It goes all the way back to African slave culture, like a symbol for their lack of autonomy. 

We went in there looking for the guy that had brought those people back. I’d done some research which suggested that killing the bokor would free the zombies, but that wasn’t the initial goal necessarily. We hoped to talk to them and convince them to reverse whatever they'd done. But we didn't find anything. 

Another idea that we had was holy water. There’s a Filipino monster, sometimes it’s called a marahig, cross between a zombie and a vampire. Supposedly, water temporarily turns them into worms or maggots, or maybe a worm that’s caused them to come back is scared of water, it’s not really clear. Most folktales have multiple variations like that. We figured holy water would cover our bases. But no luck there either. In the end, we just had to shoot them down, call it a day, and label this as one of those unsolvable cases. We thought it was a one-off thing. 

**When did you realize that it wasn’t an isolated incident?**

Well, a month or so later, we ran into them again in Savannah, Georgia. That’s when we started thinking that maybe it was a more widespread issue. We still didn’t think it would get anything near the size of what it did. We kind of expected it to just stay more in the realm of manageable but undiscovered by the general public. Like all the other stuff we’d hunted before. 

**Did you ever consider going to the authorities or taking your story to the news?**

**[Winchester laughs.]**

No, we weren’t trying for a one-way ticket to an asylum. Or prison, if they decided that we didn’t believe it ourselves. We were essentially on the run at that point. Not actively, but every once in a while, we’d get caught up in something bigger than we’d planned for, and the feds would catch our scent again. 

**Like at the Milwaukee Bank?**

Yeah, that was a shifter,[5] just to get the record straight. We never really got the chance to explain, had to book it before we ended up in supermax[6] or something.

Sorry, I’m getting off-track. You probably want to know about all the traveling we did, not boring speculation and moral philosophy. Where was I? Oh, when did we start seeing more zombies?

**It’s no issue. You’re welcome to talk about that or anything else that was significant to you.**

So you’re saying I’ve got a captive audience. I could talk your ear off about lore if you let me. I should probably keep this short though. Dean’s gotten really into cooking since we settled here. He's downright tyrannical about mealtimes, and he’ll be pissed if I miss dinner. Oh, right, the bunker! 

We came across it by accident not long before most people fled west. It had been abandoned sometime in the fifties, we think, based on the technology we found here. The security built into it is insane, and we picked it as our home base. Dean calls it the “Batcave."[7] We were both excited to have a place to come home to. It was originally just the two of us rattling around in here, but our friends Ellen and Jo moved in once the zombie situation got really bad. We were able to convince Bobby to come down a little later. The three of them held down the fort when we were out on expeditions. 

**These expeditions, that’s when you found the other survivors?**

Most of them, yeah. Some of the people that stayed here lived in this town before the virus. Maybe they didn’t feel like uprooting their lives entirely. Maybe they got left behind. The first thing we did after The Panic sent everyone running and this place turned into a ghost town was to sift through the area and pick up strays. There weren’t that many, honestly, that decided to come with us. Maybe 15 or 20 people in total. It’s a small town, and the majority had already left. 

The others were folks that we found on the road, so to speak. When I say the bunker is our home base, that’s just what I mean. We don’t stay here most of the time, even now. Dean and I, we’ve always been drifters. So we spent much of the war just wandering across the country, camping out in the woods or in deserted buildings that we could find. We set out with the intention to look for other people that didn’t make it to the coast. There wasn’t a lot of news coverage getting to the bunker, but from what we saw, it didn’t seem like the government was trying very hard to find everyone. I mean, I’m sure they had bigger concerns, but that’s how we saw it. 

**Why was it your responsibility to make sure these people made it? Why not just hide out in your bunker?**

**[He shrugs.]**

We know how to do it, so why not? 

**What was it like, walking through dead zones?**

It was weird, for sure. I’ve spent nearly my whole life seeing America through a car window. I’ve walked more streets than I can name. The quietness really gets me. I mean, that’s a positive sign that something’s wrong when we’re working a case. When a town is quiet, when there are no kids running around playing, when the normal sounds of businesses running and people living their lives disappears, that’s when we’re normally in trouble. 

We were definitely not used to walking that much, either. Before the virus, we drove most everywhere. Dean hates flying, so. The country feels immense when you’re on foot. Plus, we didn’t do a lot of marathon running or anything. Yeah, we were healthy and could hoof it if we needed to. We could move pretty fast, and we could run for our lives if pressed. But a lot of the time we spent on cases was research. Lots of sitting and reading, lots of interviewing witnesses. Hunting zombies took a lot of the complexity out of it. I mean, once we worked out that we needed to go for the head. 

It was tricky, at first, learning to go for head shots. We had always been trained to shoot at center mass, you know? It’s a hell of a lot easier to scatter a ghost with a torso shot, and it can mean life or death. But in our line of work, we have to be adaptable. Sometimes, near the end of an expedition, we’d run out of ammo and have to fall back on machetes and bowies.[8] The movies don’t show how hard it is to lop off a zombie’s head. It’s messy, and we had to clean and sharpen our blades every day. Luckily, that was something Dad had drilled into our heads. Maintaining our weapons was second-nature. 

I’d say the most remarkable thing about it all was getting to know the other survivors. When we work a case, we usually don’t spend a lot of time with the same people, day in and day out. But we spent weeks, sometimes months getting a group where they needed to go. It was surreal, that amount of human interaction. Until then, I rarely formed lasting bonds with people. It just wasn’t worth it when I knew we’d have to leave within the week. 

**Did you bring every person you found back to the bunker?**

No, we barely had the space for the ones who did stay! Where we took them depended on where we were, geographically, that is if they didn’t have a preference. Some people had a particular destination in mind. They wanted to get to California, or they had family in Omaha. They knew someone who was holed up in the mountains somewhere, waiting it out. Honestly, we didn’t know where all the strongholds were back then. Some of them, we ran into by mistake. But we would remember them and know to take people there in the future. The number of times we were nearly shot, it’s kind of crazy that no one took us out by accident. 

The one place that we wouldn’t take people was far up north. We didn’t want to drop anyone off to die. I know what I’m talking about, and very few people would have survived that. I wasn’t going to lead the next Donners.[9]

Not everyone survived the journey either. We did what we could, but some people were sick when we found them. Not everyone was strong enough to walk that far. Not everyone wanted to. There was this one elderly man, Reginald. We found him pushing a shopping cart from the store, headed home, making all sorts of racket. I don’t know how he wasn’t discovered sooner. He point-blank refused to go with us. Said that he was too old to be running around, that he didn’t want to slow us down and would just keep on living his life for as long as he could. 

Some people we came across had already been infected. It’s hard to look someone in the eyes and have to put a bullet in their head, knowing that they haven’t done anything wrong yet. I see all their faces when I go to sleep at night. But we had a responsibility to the people that we were leading. It would have put us all in danger if we couldn’t make those hard decisions. 

**How many people did you save?**

I have no idea. A lot of them, we don’t know what happened after we left. That’s not really something we keep track of anyway. If we did that, it would have been too easy to decide that we’d done enough, that we’d already saved enough people. There’s always more people. The FBI would probably disagree, but what do they know? 

**What are you doing now that the war is over?**

We went back to the type of hunting that we did before. Except now, we get a lot of calls, we’re not looking in the newspapers as much. Dean thinks it’s cool that people know us. He says we’re like the unpaid version of Ghostbusters.[10] Still trying to stay low profile, in case the feds remember we’re here. 

**Why did you want to meet here? Why run the risk of discovery?**

**[Winchester gestures expansively around the room, a spacious, open library. He knocks once on the sturdy wooden table.]**

I wanted you to be able to see where they stayed. Or, some of them. These tables, most of the furniture really, were moved to make more room. It might be hard to imagine now, but maybe thirty people slept right here on mattresses we stole from a store in town. It was abandoned, don’t worry about that. This place means safety to a whole lot of people. It’s something I’m proud of.

**You aren’t worried that people will know how to find you?**

**[He grins at me.]**

That’s what we’re counting on. 

**Author's Note:**

> 1Note that any use of "we" denotes Sam and Dean Winchester. [return to text
> 
> 2A 1987 Chevrolet Impala. [return to text
> 
> 3A reference to the Lost Colony of Roanoke, North Carolina, which disappeared mysteriously in its entirety, sometime between 1587-1590. [return to text
> 
> 4A supernatural dog common in folklore. It is believed that they have infernal origins, hence their name. [return to text
> 
> 5Winchester never explained what exactly he meant. It is unclear whether he was referring to a “shapeshifter” or using an antiquated term for a con artist. [return to text
> 
> 6Super-maximum and administrative maximum security (ADX) can refer to the highest security unit in a prison or a prison compound that houses particularly dangerous criminals. [return to text
> 
> 7A reference to the comic book superhero Batman’s secret headquarters. [return to text
> 
> 8A large American-made knife with a blade that is double-edged at the tip. [return to text
> 
> 9The Donner Party was a group of American pioneers who became trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains over the winter of 1846-1847. They resorted to cannibalism as food supplies dwindled. [return to text
> 
> 10A reference to the 1984 comedy film about a group of scientists who save the world from a supernatural threat. [return to text


End file.
